Appendix:Egyptian pronunciation

The historical pronunciation of Egyptian underwent numerous significant changes over the course of several millennia. The pronunciation of the earlier stages can be reconstructed on the basis of a variety of evidence, such as the pronunciation of Coptic (and comparison between its dialects), transcriptions and loanwords (both to and from other languages), changing orthographic usage and internal evidence, and, most controversially, comparative Afroasiatic evidence. Because the work of reconstructing earlier Egyptian phonology only began to gather steam recently, in the second half of the 20th century, and because some aspects of it remain under debate, Egyptologists traditionally use a conventional ‘Egyptological pronunciation’ that is not intended to reflect any actual historical pronunciation for the sake of convenience.

Wiktionary includes, if possible, both the reconstructed historical pronunciation (according to the prevailing scholarly view) and the modern conventional Egyptological pronunciation. Because of the long-term changes in the language’s historical pronunciation, it is necessary to approach it from a diachronic perspective and select particular stages to include. Below, the changes in the pronunciation of the language over time are detailed, and the stages included by default are highlighted: Old Egyptian, c. 2500 ; Middle Egyptian, c. 1700 ; Amarna-period Late Egyptian, c. 1350 ; and latest Late Egyptian, c. 800. Following this, explanations are given of the conventions used for representing Egyptian pronunciation at Wiktionary.

Sound changes
The large table in this section shows a possible sequence of sound changes leading from Old Egyptian to Coptic with example vocabulary items. The phonological values and history given here broadly follow the reconstruction paradigm of Fecht, Osing, Schenkel, and Loprieno, but draw from the other works given in the references (especially Peust) to revise and clarify some details. Details are generally much less clear for earlier periods than for later periods. Highlighted rows indicate the forms typically given as reconstructions for each stage of the language in Wiktionary entries. When the Coptic dialects break apart, the vocabulary items follow the path of Bohairic Coptic.

The more speculative early phonological history proposed by some followers of the neuere Komparatistik school has largely been excluded, as it relies heavily on debated Afroasiatic correspondences and other uncertain evidence, and as it is far from clear whether such phonological changes, if they took place, happened within the historical period at all. The tendency to try to force Proto-Egyptian consonants into a ‘neat’ phonological system has especially been avoided where other evidence is lacking.

Symbols used:


 * > sound change
 * >! unexpected change
 * / in the following phonetic environment
 * _ stands for the position of the phoneme in the phonetic environment
 * / _ everywhere (in all phonetic environments)
 * # word boundary
 * + morpheme boundary
 * $ syllable boundary
 * V vowel
 * V̀ unstressed vowel
 * V́ stressed vowel
 * C consonant
 * Cʰ aspirated consonant
 * [...] any one of the enclosed phonemes
 * (...) encloses optional elements
 * ∅ null (e.g. phoneme deleted; not to be confused with )
 * A, B, F, L, M, S sigla specifying a Coptic or pre-Coptic dialect in which the change occurred

The aspirable and ejective series may alternatively be an aspirated and plain voiceless series, respectively; both interpretations are held by numerous scholars. However, typological considerations argue strongly against the latter interpretation.

The actual phonetic values of and  are extremely unclear. Recent suggestions for the value of the former include, etc.; the latter, , etc.

The phonemic representation of ⟨g⟩,  ⟨q⟩,  ⟨ẖ⟩, and  ⟨ḫ⟩ is purely conventional. In truth, ⟨g⟩ and  ⟨q⟩ probably share the same place of articulation (velar?) and are distinguished by some unknown feature, and possibly both may be expressed as labiovelars in certain environments. The details remain unclear. Similarly, ⟨ẖ⟩ and  ⟨ḫ⟩ may in fact both be velar or uvular fricatives distinguished by some unknown feature; only the Old Kingdom palatalization of  in certain cases points to a possible more forward articulation.

Consonants
The chart below shows the way in which Egyptian consonants are represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Wiktionary entries. Most of the diachronic changes in the chart reflect the sound changes given above; some, however, merely represent changes in orthographical conventions.

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Egyptological pronunciation
The conventional modern Egyptological pronunciation does not reflect any actual historical pronunciation, but is directly derived from the written representation of Egyptian by a series of arbitrary conventions.

The consonants of Egyptian are given the values listed in the table above under ‘Egyptological pronunciation’; as shown, some of them are pronounced as vowels, following abandoned 19th-century ideas about the historical Egyptian pronunciation. ⟨w⟩ is generally rendered, but root-initially (and exceptionally elsewhere) many Egyptologists instead pronounce it as. Some speakers add a glottal stop in various places, such as before pronominal suffixes and between identical vowels.

An epenthetic vowel is inserted as needed to break up consonant clusters, so that no more than one consonant in a row starts or ends each word, and no more than two consonants appear sequentially within a word. The causative prefix and all  suffixes (and, optionally, the feminine suffix ) are ignored when determining where to insert  in the rest of the word. Words consisting of only a single consonant have added before them if the consonant is a sonorant; otherwise,  is added after them. An can also be added to separate two identical consonants. In words containing a reduplication, the two reduplicated parts are pronounced identically and no intervenes between them.

Exceptions to these conventions are rare; a significant one is that is pronounced  instead of the expected.